Twitter is one of the world’s biggest social network, with 231.7 million active users all over the globe. According to Brickfish, 100 million of them log in daily, sending an astonishing 5,000 tweets every second.
In addition, three million websites are integrated with Twitter, making them invaluable for brands and businesses as well as people keen to stay in touch with friends.
For this reason, event organizers should not be missing out on the opportunity to publicize their conferences, webinars and other happenings using the social network. It is easier than most users imagine, but if you need some help, we have put together some advice that could guide you towards a successful promotional campaign.
Set up your Event Profile
Firstly, it’s vital to actually have a profile on Twitter, which can be a special one created especially for the event or a more general variety linked to your business name. Make sure you follow as many potential clients or audience members as you can think of, as this will encourage them to follow you back.
Do this in advance of your event so you have time to build up a personality by sending out regular Tweets – a sudden barrage of promotional information may be off-putting.
Identify your Event and Industry Hashtags
When you are ready, think of a hashtag for your event so that it will come up in searches. Think carefully about this, as you don’t want it to get lost or hijacked. Make it relevant, not too long, easy to spell and unambiguous, for example #GEVME. Also try to do research to identify your industry hashtags (if you are not aware of it already), such as #eventprofs for the Event industry.
Create awareness of your Twitter profile and hashtag
Put your twitter handle and hashtag on all the emails you send out, as well as your online ticket registration forms, to ensure awareness among your exhibitors and attendees. You can also include your social media presence icons in your event ticket page – your event management software will let you do this easily and it will encourage recipients to use it.
Involve the Exhibitors Early
If your Twitter following is less than your total number of exhibitors who have a Twitter account, you would have failed to engage the exhibitors, which forms a key part of your audience. Many a times, the focus of event marketers will be on attendees but a key segment to engage prior to attendee engagement is actually the exhibitors. Having a vested interest in the event, it would be good for your Twitter handle to follow the exhibitors first, make them aware of your event twitter handle and hashtag, and subsequently, encourage them through your exhibitor management team to contribute tweets using the event hashtag, to amplify the awareness of your event’s social media presence to their own followers. This will eventually help you build your base of followers as well as regular stream of tweets, to make it a sustainable effort to Twitter content.
Include Twitter Handle as optional registration field
I rarely see this but during the attendee registration process, you could ask for the attendee’s Twitter handle as an optional field. In this way, you can follow your attendees, while making sure to invite them to follow you back as you provide event updates along the way.
Embeddable Tweets on your Event Website
How many tweets do you think you can generate from an event landing page? 1, 2 or 3? What if I tell you that it can easily generate 20 tweets to your twitter queue, and at the same time, encourage retweets to your Twitter army.
Take a look at this sample event landing page to see what I mean. Try clicking on any of the twitter button and you can see that the content is easily Tweetable. By breaking down the landing page content to tweetable snippets, you can easily schedule it over time to contribute to your tweetable content, while at the same time, encourage people to share your content via Twitter when they find it relevant and meaningful when they visit your event website. This can easily be done via our WYSIWYG editor, which comes with our custom twitter widget button for embeddable tweet.
So start planning your Twitter strategy for your event promotions and drive sustainable content together with your event eco-system to grow your social media engagement.
